You'll Never Guess Which City Has The Most Airbnb Properties

Since launching in 2008, Airbnb has absolutely exploded in popularity. It’s posted impressive growth numbers every single year since its early San Francisco beginnings, and despite how ubiquitous the platform already seems, it shows no sign of slowing down. As with any global platform, though, some cities have become vastly more popular than others. The chart below shows the top ten cities with the highest number of Airbnb properties available there.

Topping the list is Paris, where you can choose from 78,000 properties dotted around artistic and trendy Le Marais, diverse and picturesque Belleville, and the rest of the city's twenty arrondissements. The City of Light has plenty of unique options to suit your mood, ranging from whitewashed minimalist studios to spacious artist lofts, with more being added every day. In the three months spanning June 1 to September 1, 2016, Airbnb saw a 20% increase in guest arrivals in Paris and an impressive 80% increase across the rest of France. Those figures firmly secure France's place as Airbnb's second-largest market in the world, trailing only the United States.

Number two on the list is London, which boasts 47,000 Airbnb properties across the city. London has also seen widespread growth in its number of Airbnb properties over the past couple of years, leading to options ranging from a backyard yurt to a Shoreditch hipster haven. After London, four more European cities make the list, as New York City, Rio de Janeiro, Los Angeles, Barcelona, Rome, Copenhagen, Sydney and Amsterdam round out the top ten, respectively.

Looking at things from a per capita perspective, the high concentration of Airbnb listings in Paris is astounding, even to those who know the city well. Paris’ 78,000 listings equates to approximately one Airbnb property per every thirty residents, while second-place London’s 47,000 properties works out to one Airbnb property for every two hundred residents. Compare Paris' figures to Shanghai, which has a population approximately ten times greater, and you'd be surprised to learn that Shanghai hasn’t cracked the top ten. In fact, none of the world's twenty largest megalopolises by population—a list which includes Beijing, New Delhi, Istanbul, Tokyo, São Paulo, Mexico City and others—make the top ten here. Clearly, Airbnb has spread through the United States and Europe much more quickly than it has Asia, Africa and beyond.

If ever William Gibson’s famed line jumps to mind, it's here and now. “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.”